ANDREW MARSZAL -
As a tour guide specialising in notorious Hollywood deaths, Scott Michaels is well aware of America’s morbid fascination with the dark side of Tinseltown.
But on the 50th anniversary of the murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others at the hands of Charles Manson’s apocalyptic cult, he has never seen anything like it.
“It’s unprecedented really. I’ve never seen the attention,” he said at his museum in Los Angeles. “I’m running extra tours, two or three extra tours a week. The attention is crazy.”
Michaels drives his customers up to Cielo Drive, the leafy and winding road above exclusive Beverly Hills where director Roman Polanski’s wife Tate — eight-and-a-half months pregnant — was stabbed to death in the early hours of August 9, 1969.
One of those customers last year was director Quentin Tarantino, undertaking research for his new hit movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” which takes the killings as its backdrop.
The deaths terrorised Hollywood and made headlines around the world. Manson, portrayed at his trial as a drug-crazed loner with mesmerising powers of persuasion, ordered devotees to carry out killings in wealthy white neighbourhoods in an effort to trigger a race war.
The film features Margot Robbie as an innocent and carefree Tate, and has intensified interest in a tragedy often described as a seminal moment in US history — the end of the 1960s era of peace and love.
“Sharon was beautiful... She’s become this sort of true crime symbol of absolute good, whereas Manson is the opposite,” says Michaels, who is credited as a technical consultant on the film.
Manson died in a California prison in 2017, but the gruesome details of the murders he ordered live on.
Tate, just 26, pleaded for the life of her unborn child as she was stabbed to death by Manson’s disciples, four of whom broke into her house at night. Polanski was away in Europe, but four other guests in their home were also butchered.
Abigail Folger, a coffee heiress, was peacefully reading her book in bed when the attackers stormed in and killed her.
While Michaels’ “Dearly Departed” museum in Los Angeles serves up a range of macabre mementos and grisly guided tours of deaths ranging from Janis Joplin to the “Black Dahlia,” the Manson murders stand apart.
“It’s my favourite case. Favourite sounds awful. But it is, I gotta admit to that,” says Michaels, noting that the story “includes rock stars and movie stars and glamour and monsters.” — AFP
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